Sunday, November 06, 2016

How to Free Up Space on Your PlayStation 4

The Sony’s PlayStation 4 usually comes with a 500GB hard drive, however games size are getting bigger and bigger every day they are created and updated. For instance, the Grand Theft Auto V alone needs a 50GB of space on the hard drive, even though you are using the disc. In case you notice your PS4 reaching its limit often, you should consider getting a larger hard drive for your PS4. The PlayStation 4 allows you to get 500GB drive, so you can remove it and replace it with a larger one. You can replace it with a 2TB drive which is multiplying your PS4’s default internal storage by four. You can even upgrade to a solid-state drive which makes your games to load faster.The PS4 doesn’t allow you to install games on external drives unlike the Xbox One. So to expand your console’s storage for games, you have to replace the internal drive with a larger one.Here’s how to free up space–and upgrade your PS4’s storage capacity so you can fit more games.Checking What’s Eating Up Your SpaceIn order to see exactly the files that are eating up space on your console, you have to head to Settings > System Storage Management. So from there you’ll be able to see exactly how much free space you have left as well as how much data is used by your apps, the capture gallery (that includes your saved video clips and screenshots), saved datas (like save games), and themes.From there you can select any of the categories to see exactly what’s eating up space and start removing things. So here’s how to free up space on your PS4.Deleting Games and AppsGames are likely the things that consume most of the storage space on your PlayStation 4, so in order to free up space, you should start by deleting games.So you can always navigate to the previous screen to check how much space the games are using. Press the “Options” button on your controller and select “Delete” to delete one or more games. Select the games you want to delete and select the “Delete” button.Also note that when you delete a game, it’s saved game data isn’t deleted. So you can go ahead and delete to save space or you can reinstall the game in the future and resume from where you left off.So you’ll need to reinstall it if you still want to play the game again. I suggest you should uninstall games you have on disc rather than the ones you’ve to re-download. So games you have on disc will be installed from the disc when you insert them into your PS4, although they may have to download gigabytes of patches afterwards. Delete Saved Game Data You can check how much storage is used by saved game data by heading to Settings > Application Saved Data Management > Saved Data in System Storage > Delete.So in case you won’t be playing the game again in the future, you don’t have to care about the saved data, and you can just remove this data from your PS4 to save space. Some certain games aren’t well optimized and programmed and will have a very large save files which can be removed to free up a large noticeable amount of space. So to remove data, select a game in the list, select the saved games data you want to delete, and then select “Delete”.You can navigate to Settings > Application Saved Data Management > Saved Data in System Storage > Copy to USB Storage Device to backup the saved data in case you might still want to play the game again in the future. Also from there, you can copy saved games data to a USB drive or external hard drive that is connected to your PS4 and restore it to your console in the future.And in case you have a paid PlayStation Plus subscription, your PS4 will backup your saved games data online. With that you can head to Saved Data Management > Saved Data in System Storage > Upload to Online Storage to confirm the data is backed up before deleting it.Deleting Screenshots and Recorded VideosAll screenshots taken and videos you recorded are all stored on your PS4’s internal storage. So you may be able to free up some space by removing some unnecessary images or video clips. You navigate to Settings > System Storage Management > Capture Gallery to view the screenshots and videos eating up your PS4 space.If you would like to delete all screenshots and videos associated with a specific game, you can just select a game icon in this menu, press the “Options” button on the controller, and then select “Delete”. You can also make use of the “Copy to USB Storage” option here which you can use to copy the screenshots and videos to a USB storage device before deleting them.Deleting ThemesThemes can also occupy some certain amount of your console space if you have many installed. You can also see how much space they occupy on the System Storage Management screen. So navigate to Settings > System Storage Management > Themes. Then remove any themes you aren’t using. Of course, you can always re-download them again later.PS4 image via Flickr by Jfingas